The management of windows is an important issue for an operation system.
In various operation systems, a window can include several major parts such as title bar, menu bar, work area, etc.
For a single window, a user can scale or move the window by dragging the mouse. The user also can control the size of the window by using mouse to double-click its title bar, and even adjust the size of the window using a restore button provided on the title bar.
However, the window management in the prior art suffers from at least the following defects.
When there are two or more windows, the user can only manage the windows one by one to achieve the desired locations and sizes of the windows. In this case, the operation is very complicated. This is illustrated by an example as follows:
There are three windows shown as arranged from left to right in FIG. 1a. If the user wants to arrange the three windows in parallel, he/she has to select one of the windows (the bottom one) first and adjust the size of the selected window to obtain the arrangement shown in FIG. 1b. 
Then, the user selects the middle window and adjusts its size to obtain the arrangement shown in FIG. 1c. Finally, the user selects the top one and adjusts its size to obtain the arrangement shown in FIG. 1d. 
It should be noted that it further requires the user to perform a number of operations to individually adjust the size and location of each of the windows.
There are only three windows in the above example. If there are a larger number of windows, more operations will be required. Thus, when there are many windows, the existing window management solution requires a large number of user operations, which causes inconvenience.
Moreover, windows are the most important part in a user interface of a computer system. They provide a user with a visible interface from which the user can view the resources provided by the system. Herein, when presented in a window, a resource provided by the system is referred to as an element in the window. For the system, window is a tool. The more information a window provides to the user, the higher the utilization of the window and thus the system resources.
In the prior art, a window provides only basic information to the user. For example, when a folder is opened in a window, the contents in the folder will be shown as a list of icons in the window. When the user scales a window, it is possible to display as many icons as possible in a visible area of the window by changing the layout of the elements in the window, as illustrated in FIG. 2.
In this way, the number of elements displayed in the visible area of the window can be changed by changing the layout of the elements. However, this known approach still fails to take full advantage of a window to provide more information to the user.